It’s summer in Australia and it’s – cool? So much for global warming, I hear you say. Hey, not so fast… just because we get one cooler summer out of the last decade doesn’t mean that global warming has become global cooling. I noticed on the TV news someone already claiming that Australia is back to its “normal cycle” of drought and flooding rains after a long – perhaps the longest – drought. Well, maybe, but isn’t it hard to be certain with just one sample? It’s certainly raining now, and raining like crazy, but isn’t that also a prediction of global warming? That our rain will come in bucket loads with ever more powerful and unseasonal storms? Hmmm. It’s rather a bit more complicated than ‘it’ll just get hotter and drier and it’ll never rain again’.
After all Global warming is global, not regional, for starters. We are looking at the overall heat balance of the planet, not your particular country, state or city. The naysayers still believe that ‘puny’ humans can never influence climate and that we are arrogant to even imagine we have such power. They are looking at tiny humanity and contrasting our weak force and size with the immensity of our planet, its atmosphere and its oceans. They are drawing the conclusion that no matter what we do there’s so much water and air on the planet that our emissions are barely noticed. And yes, they are relatively small in percentage terms. But they are growing and have been doing so in abundance since the beginning of the industrial revolution. China and India are still emerging in this regard and many people remain without the means to pollute, at least to the degree that the rich western nations can. Imagine what happens when the rest of the world catches up.
The second argument is that “we have always had cycles of heating and cooling”, which is true. The contention is that the global warming theorists have just mistaken the warming phase of a natural cycle to be caused by humans, which is again a reasonable thing to propose and investigate. The trouble is that the naysayers don’t seem to go out and investigate. They say “wrong” really fast but don’t back it up with any research. None that I’ve seen, anyway. As I’ve already documented in earlier posts it’s clear that we humans have raised the carbon dioxide levels to a higher but still small percentage of the overall atmosphere, but that this level is actually accelerating faster that ever before and is already at higher levels than have ever been found. This is corroborated by samples taken from ice cores, for example. It needs also to be mentioned that there have never been over 6 billion humans on the planet before, let alone the number of cars, houses, factories and power stations we have these days. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that by ceaselessly clearing land and burning coal and oil we will at some point have an effect on local patterns of weather, if not regionally. And if El Nino/La Nina is anything to go by then these regional influences can have intra-regional effects. And if Australia and affect Peru in that fairly large way then it’s likely that we are impacting climate generally in at least some small way.
I won’t go on. You’ve read it all before. But here’s an article in Science mag that notes the rising temperatures in the North Atlantic over the last 50 years and quite fairly mentions that the human cause – or otherwise – is hard to prove. Indeed. So do we sit and wait and continue to clear land and churn out pollution, or do we take action against a sea of troubles? Your call.